February 18, 2007

It’s happened to mostly everyone in sales that I know….you go from being number one…the person everyone looks up to and wants to emulate…to not being able to sell a few household goods at a car boot sale ! There really can be few more depressing sights that the salesman who suddenly cannot sell. It’s akin to a football striker who suddenly cannot score.

The golden rule for footballers is that once they get a goal, any goal, then things will be well and they will soon be banging them in the net. In many ways this is the same for salesman, once another deal is closed then all of a sudden many deals get closed. Why ? Confidence. The confidence to go about doing the things you always used to do *without* thinking of them.

Many people I know seem to labour under the delusion that great salesman are born not made. Here at Jana we fundamentally disagree with that. Being a good salesman is a discipline like any other trade. Sales staff have to be trained and occasionally have some mnetoring in key areas, such as closing deals, handling objections, negotiating offers, figuring out next steps in a complicated sales process.

We believe its either the salesman’s assigned mentor, or the sales director who should step in and help out when the going gets tough. Unfortunately when the going gets tough in many firms the tough are told that there services are no longer required, which is incredibly shortsighted when you think about the amount of training that goes into making a salesman proficient in a companies technology or product.

I’m going to sign of by relaying two of my favourite one liners that really can help focus you in sales (and I’d love to hear anymore that you may have):

“A salesman’s second best answer is’no'” – you don’t want to be chasing rainbows – if there really si no deal, get out of there and move on to an organisation where there is one.

“Don’t confuse implementation with selling” – I’ve seen so many salesmen or pre-sales tell the customer things in the sales cycle that only have relevance when you come to implementation – don’t go there, there is no need, you’ll only confuse the issue.

February 16, 2007

At Swivel you can upload any kind of data and display it visually for others ,who can then rate it, or comment on it, bookmark it etc. As well as a multitude of other things, you can compare data to find possible correlations.

Swivel is very slick and a very good implementation of a web 2.0 concept, with a unique idea – it will be interesting to see how this develops.

February 4, 2007

James Schneider, the CFO at Dell resigned unexpectedly after a series of probes by the US Securities and Exchange commission into accounting practices at the company. He was replace by board member, Donald Carty ,who also assumes the role of vice chairman.